I’ll tell you what I saw and damn lucky I am to see anything. I was just shooting the shit no big deal when one of those city trucks what do you call them came past with all its gear sticking out and damn near put my fucking eye out. Thanks a lot motherfucker. I turned around to say thanks a lot motherfucker and ended up giving the one fingered wave to Joe Hynes, you know him right. I told Joe I’ve been doing a little goon work for what was left of Talents West, you know the places, Ricks before it was DreamGirls at Ricks. I started doing odd jobs some side work from time to time for the Colacurcio’s around the time of the accidental fire Ricks had just after it got bought up. Accident my eye. Takes all kinds of meat to make a good sauce and that’s all I’m saying about what I know about that. I know how to keep my mouth shut and one eye open. So Joe says we should go see the Citizen at the Cyclops see if he can stand a drink if he isn’t too shitfaced blind already. So we walked to the Cyclops, the new one not the old place anymore you see by way of the market in by the newstand papers and magazine racks postcards of the Space Needle and Ranier and past Delaurentis cheeses olive oils pastas meats cured and the daily dozen doughnuts of cinnamon and plain or sprinkled round the corner of flying fish, overpriced with a stunt fish the same stunt fish over and again tossed daily for tourists with cameras Nikon Cannon Olympus Pentax Sony Samsung and Rachel pig bronze sat upon with a slot for coins etc. smelling of Market Spice teas herbs past stairs down under to skybridge over then crabs cooked and salmon Copper river now in King Coho Sockeye and Chum and no wild Steelhead by mussels spot shrimp and smoked and fresh of all descriptions past lavender bunches dried and lotions salves lavender lip gloss body butter and Uli’s sausages near onions of red and white and yellow beans peppers red green yellow orange carrots lettuce curly or flat lovage mizuna kale green or rainbow spinach potatoes salad onions sugar snap peas raabs various artichokes baby and adult brussels sprouts beets and greens of beets collard greens cabbage radishes red or french breakfast arugula asparagus baby bok choy celery root chickweed cilantro garlic dandelion greens parsley rhubarb sunchokes turnips squash blossoms including and not limited to zucchini fiddleheads mushrooms fresh and dried raspberries apples pears no fresh cherries but chives mint parsley rosemary sage thyme flowers tulips pink purple fuscia red white yellow puce and t-shirts same colors postcards, paintings carved things magnets Space Needle bags jewelery and raining some past crack park odoriferous urine with the totems cedar carved fifty or sixty feet and eye in the sky and sharpened at the top.

Like this:

So we each have a key to the apartment but there is only one do-not-duplicate key for the building, and from the very initial moment of our shared existence we have struggled over it, clandestinely. At the moment I have it. Haines wanted to know what’s the rent? $700. There are several studios like ours along the Market, but Buck told Haines ours is the omphalos, which would be about the right size of our place if the Market were a body but in that case our little hole in the wall would be located a bit farther south and around the back. They say all dynamic systems are sensitively dependent on initial conditions, and the current one I am flapping around in is starting to bug me. I’m feeling denied.

Like this:

Looking out the window you’d think this would be a choice place to live but I’m sitting on lawn furniture right now and I sleep in a hammock. If Haines stays much longer then I am out of here. Gone. Where? Buck on and on this morning about the great mother sea, fist to fist as we sit by the sea. Our mother the ash grey sea. Just look at it. The ballbusting snotgreen sea. Terrifying. Calling me Kinch the knife but I am not the knife. I can’t be knife. My knife would be made out of the infinitely small, forever dividing within itself the closer you look before it could ever slice something so sinewy as life or thought or time. Somebody show me where Augustine says the now is a knife edge without thickness. So many quote him on that without specific attribution but where does he say this. Show me specifically where. Perhaps I am blind. It is what he believes though, that this now moment, this one, right here and not the one where your eyes were moving when I began this sentence about the now moment but this one now this one divides the past infinite and exploding multitudinous and infinite to nausea from the future singular one. But which one? To be or to be? That is the question.